Building Smart Cities

Carol Stimmel has penned a book not just to be read by city planners, engineers, or technology experts. This narrative is for all of us ― the artist, a student, the farmer, a banker. ‘Using design thinking, a human-centered approach to innovation, urban designers can create new products and processes that are well-grounded in empathy.’ These are weighted words of truth as we move forward, seeking balance in an often unbalanced world, Ms. Stimmel’s voice resonates in deeply human prose and debate, relevant to our humanity today, the past and most succinctly, our collective future.

―John Stanmeyer, American photojournalist, National Geographic
The term “smart city” defines the new urban environment, one that is designed for performance through information and communication technologies. Given that the majority of people across the world will live in urban environments within the next few decades, it’s not surprising that massive effort and investment is being placed into efforts to develop strategies and plans for achieving “smart” urban growth. Building Smart Cities: Analytics, ICT, and Design Thinking explains the technology and a methodology known as design thinking for building smart cities.

Information and communications technologies form the backbone of smart cities. A comprehensive and robust data analytics program enables the right choices to be made in building these cities. Design thinking helps to create smart cities that are both livable and able to evolve. This book examines all of these components in the context of smart city development and shows how to use them in an integrated manner. Using the principles of design thinking to reframe the problems of the smart city and capture the real needs of people living in a highly efficient urban environment, the book helps city planners and technologists through the following:
  • Presentation of the relevant technologies required for coordinated, efficient cities
  • Exploration of the latent needs of community stakeholders in a culturally appropriate context
  • Discussion of approaches to ideation, design, prototyping, and building or retrofitting smart cities
  • Proposal of a model for a viable smart city project

The smart city vision of creating an optimized society through technology is hypothetical at best and reflects the failed repetition through the ages of equating scientific progress with positive social change. Up until now, despite our best hopes and efforts, technology has yet to bring an end to scarcity or suffering. Technical innovation, instead, can and should be directed in the service of our shared cultural values, especially within the rapidly growing urban milieu. 
Carol Stimmel has set out to carry forward many of the lessons in early smart cities efforts. She lays out her thinking in a rigorous and methodical manner that serves to teach the reader design-thinking principles for solving challenging complex smarter cities problems. She also provides an innovative framework within which to consider appropriate solutions. But, perhaps the most compelling thing about this book is the demonstration of the fact that the vision for human-centric smart cities is entirely achievable and wholesomely probable – this is not some idyllic future, this is a reality that we are quickly coming to face and for which we have tools to address.

― From the Book’s Foreword by Sherry Comes, IBM Distinguished Engineer & CTO/Entrepreneur